2017 Individual Support Grant Recipients

Fingering #292016Charcoal fingerprints on wall, with framed graphite drawings mounted on top

Judith Braun, a.k.a. Weinman or Weinperson, began as a realistic figurative painter in the 1980’s, and has periodically reinvented her art practice and persona. In the 1990’s, as Weinperson, she produced enlarged xerox works with racial and feminist content, participating in such venues as the “Bad Girls” show at the New Museum of Contemporary Art.

Now, as Braun, she makes intricate abstract drawings, both small graphite on paper and large charcoal fingerprinted walls. The latter are site- specific ephemeral installations that have been subject of solo and group exhibitions in New York City, and throughout the US and Europe. They are sometimes executed live, for the public, and because of the performative quality of production she was featured in a documentary, “More Art Upstairs”, which is currently on the film festival circuit. Braun was born in Albany, NY, and has lived and worked on the Lower East Side in New York City for many years. She received a Pollock Krasner Grant and an Artists’ Fellowship Inc. Grant in 2013, and her work is represented in many private collections.

Greg Bray works within a framework of linked consciousness pushing up against boundaries. Whether it’s the collective discomfort of race or the circuitous route of institutional power structures, connecting concerns of observed condition within interpretations of relative truths stemming from cultural collisions in it’s increasing interconnectivity. Challenging how we change as we confront change. His early art form grew out of the inherently and overtly political Black Arts Movement.

Last Gambit of the Dark Queen2016Acrylic marker and oil stick on paper50 x 60"

Tracey Brockett was born in Toronto, Canada, and was educated there and in the US. Brockett allows the unconscious to direct the beginning of a painting, before imposing a more considered approach. She currently lives and works in rural New England.

Kenny Cole's work identifies and defines emerging moral calculi, leading him to explore; language, graphic or cartoon-like imagery, a schematic color palette, interactive canvas structures and silk-screen printing. His attraction to these forms lies in their ability to interpret, archive, and engage in, the immense degree of digital communication prevalent today, while maintaining the resistance of a hand rendered, traditional liquid medium base.

Barbara Demšar was born in Kranj, Slovenia. She has participated in over 200 group exhibitions in Slovenia and abroad. She has received 21 awards for her work in Slovenia, Croatia and US. Art workshops and has participated in 54 Art workshops in Slovenia and abroad. Her work is marked with abstract landscapes, imbued with optimism, a childlike playfulness and vividness. She currently lives and works in Škofja Loka, Slovenia.

Kumiko Karachi lets her works “question and answer one another.” Kurachi became inspired to work in Germany after witnessing an exhibition of German Minimalism in In the late 1980s in New York. With the help of a grant from the Japanese Cultural Ministry, she came to Germany in September of 2000. Kurachi currently lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany, working primarily with galleries and Institutions in Japan, Germany, and Switzerland.

Western Nocturnal2016Wood, metal and plastic objects combined with broken ceramic sculpture created by the artist18 x 16 x 9"

Cynthia Lahti is from Portland, Oregon, where she currently lives and works. Inspired by objects and images both historical and contemporary, her creations reflect her belief that even the smallest artifact can evoke the most powerful feelings. Her most recent artwork explores the way various materials affect the conceptual intent and impact of each piece and thus have expanded the artworks’ potency and eloquence. At the heart of these works is the potential of each material to evoke a different emotional response, on a full spectrum of tensions and resonances.

Always in pursuit of emotional expression has been the core of Diane Messenger's painting. Drawing live models as a young student in 1966 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts gave her the tools and facility to easily use the figure for her own expression. Diane also attended The Philadelphia College of Art and graduated with a BFA in 1990 from the Tyler School of Art. These two schools gave her a broad appreciation for many different types of art. She is continually bending the rules and climbing out of her own box to experience a new way of using line, color and space.

Her work has been more public the last ten years. A solo show at the Helen Day Art Center in Stowe, VT, First Prize at the Provincetown Art Association, acceptance the past three years in the Nor'easter show at the New Britain Museum of American Art, group show at Five Point Gallery, Torrington, CT, and a solo show this summer at Off Main Street in Wellfleet, MA to name a few.

After living and working in Philadelphia for most of her life Diane now lives in Truro, Ma.

"My heritage as an American informs, in multiple ways, my identity as a painter. The spirit of animals inspired the earliest Americans, and they continue to form an important part of our collective imagination even in modern times. I personally experience this influence, which is both sublime and universal. I feel that my broad, gestural brush strokes reflect the dynamism and interconnectedness of the vast animal kingdom. At the same time, by making these marks as a painter, I hope to visually connect and integrate their timeless forms with key elements and themes in the wider environment, politically and humanistically."

Peterson’s work has been the subject of solo shows at Addington Gallery, IL and Wantoot Modern American Art and Craft, WI, Raymond Avenue Gallery, MN., and 7&1/2 Gallery, IL.

Edouard Prulhiere was born in France. His work has been shown internationally since 1992.

Prulhiere's work constitutes an assemblage of materials, an aggregate of processes, an accumulation of structures and effects, rather than an integrated whole arranged in accord with a subject. What he calls painting is never complete or determined. The back and forth between every component of what makes a painting with its many configurations and through different manipulations, have generated variable possibilities for his art work.

Allyson Strafella has been drawing with a typewriter for 24 years. During that time, she has developed marks that are her visual language: a drawing language ‘written’ by type, and a written language drawn as mark and form. Strafella lives and works in the Hudson Valley, New York.